Glavin: Orlando shooting fits whichever story you want to tell

One would have at least hoped for a decent interval of mourning for the Orlando dead before the screaming cacophony erupted, but even before the blood had dried on the floor of the Pulse nightclub following the deadliest lone-gunman mass shooting in the history of the United States, a great many Americans were giving every impression of having lost their minds.

It’s still going on. The only thing that matters is which of the variously competing “narratives” will dominate the vulgar contest for the most popular explanation of the butcher’s motive, the meaning of the event, and the political lesson to be learned from it all.

Setting aside for a moment everything that everyone is being goaded into fighting about, most of the facts of what happened in the early hours of Sunday morning at Pulse, the “high-energy gay dance club” on Orlando’s Orange Avenue, are fairly straightforward.

Forty-nine innocents were murdered and 53 were injured. The death toll is expected to rise. The killer, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, was armed with a 17-round Glock handgun and a Sigsauer MCX: a military-style weapon similar to the assault rifles used in the 2012 mass murders in Newton, Conn. and in Aurora, Colo., and last year’s mass murders in San Bernardino, Calif. and Umpqua, Wash. Arrayed against the powerful National Rifle Association, a slim majority of Americans want assault rifles banned. So, cue the shouting.

Mateen was an abusive, twice-married, loutish and largely friendless security guard who was known to frequent gay clubs in and around Orlando, including Pulse – either to pick up men, or to scope out his targets, or both, depending on whose speculation and which reports one relies upon. Some regular Pulse patrons have said Mateen was obviously gay. Mateen’s father insists he was not: He’d once expressed revulsion at the sight of two men kissing.

Born in New York to Afghan immigrant parents, Mateen had been investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigations in 2013 following his claims to co-workers that he was a member of Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed terrorist group. Mateen called 911 during his attack, claiming he was carrying out the atrocity on behalf of the Islamic State, an Iranian-opposed terrorist group.

We are all supposed to choose one narrative over another, as if it must be that Mateen was either: a) a devoted Islamist whackjob; b) a vicious, bloodthirsty homophobe; c) a dangerously self-loathing, deeply-closeted gay man; or d) a psychopath of the kind that no sensible government would allow anywhere near a firearm.

But if you want to be a Hezbollah shaheed or an ISIL sleeper operative, those are pretty well the four key job-application prerequisites right there. There is no competition going on among and between these things. It’s the character profile of the misogynist, homophoblic, jihadist terror cadre from the Taliban to al-Qaida to Boko Haram and back again.

If you don’t know how joyfully these outfits persecute gay people, it’s not just that you haven’t been paying attention. They slaughter gay people all the time, but in locales where none of the deeper competing narratives require that we particularly care what happens, so the murdered don’t warrant rainbow flags flown at half-mast around the world in their memory.

It’s also not just possible to be both insane and a jihadi terrorist at the same time – it’s more or less mandatory. This is something New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair couldn’t quite get into his head in October 2014 when another late-blooming self-professed Islamic State enthusiast, the deranged Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, murdered Corp. Nathan Cirillo at the National War Memorial, then stormed Parliament Hill in an act of suicide “martyrdom.”

Mulcair accused the Conservative government at the time of rushing to judgement by calling Zehaf-Bibeau’s outrage a terrorist act. On the evidence that Zehaf-Bibeau was mentally ill, Mulcair insisted that “we are not in the presence of a terrorist act in the sense that we would understand it,” which was like saying you can only commit an act of suicide terrorism if you’re sane.

We can psychoanalyze all we like. It’s well worth wondering whether Mateen was drawn to a fanatical hatred of gay people because he’d become some kind of Islamist fanatic, or was drawn to religious fanaticism because he was a drooling, vicious homophobe. We can rearrange these pathologies in whatever order of preference suits our purposes.

One “narrative” that has not been inflicted upon the grieving and the wounded of Orlando – a small mercy, this time around – is that the Orlando atrocity was a to-be-expected instance of Muslim “blowback” for western imperialism. But a version of that exceedingly dangerous libel – it’s the Muslims, they just can’t be trusted, nobody knows what’s going on, and hey, are we even sure the president isn’t one of them? – is the central motif of the Orlando “narrative” favoured by the reactionary American far right. Its loudest and most explicit iteration comes from the demagoguery of the presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

What’s worth noticing is that Trump’s harvest was already well seeded, tended and watered by a commonplace “narrative” of the Left.

Within hours of the fusilade that brought down Zehaf-Bibeau in Ottawa, it was a celebrity American leftist, Glenn Greenwald, who raised the spectre of quietly vengeful Muslims in our midst: You don’t get to “run around for years wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering and bombing others” without Muslim blowback. In May, 2013, when 25-year-old Royal Fusilier Lee Rigby was hacked to death by Islamist crackpots shouting Allahu Akbar with South London accents in Woolwich, American neo-documentarist Michael Moore was crowing that the atrocity was to be expected because westerners “kill people in other countries.”

As recently as last November, the disgraced former London mayor, Ken Livingstone, was still insisting a perfectly understandable “blowback” was the motivation behind the murder of 52 Londoners ten years earlier in a series of terrorist bomb attacks. “They gave their lives. They said what they believed. They took Londoners’ lives in protest against our invasion of Iraq.”

Here’s a Toronto Star headline for you from not long ago: “To tackle domestic terrorism, end foreign wars.” The Toronto 18, the convicted Montreal terrorist Said Namouh, convicted Ottawa terrorist Momin Khawaja: Canada sent troops to Afghanistan, so the Muslims in our midst will turn on us, the narrative went.

“Blowback” for western imperialism doesn’t quite explain the tens of thousands of innocent Muslim schoolchildren, women and men, gay and straight, who have been enslaved, tormented and murdered by the likes of Hezbollah and the Islamic State lately. But they don’t count. They don’t fit into any of the clever explanations making the rounds at the moment.

That’s the thing about self-serving, fact-averse “narratives.” If you’re not careful they get out of hand, and the next thing you know, innocently devout Muslims are being blamed every time the Islamic State or Hezbollah does something atrocious. Maybe it will soon be gay people getting blamed for their own deaths, too.

In any case, there will be a “narrative” to explain it. You can be dead certain of that.

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